Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 50
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
Yeah! I have reached edition number 50! Awesome! Let’s go for the 100 editions! Thank you all for reading. Edition number 50 below:
🇬🇧 Soon in your neighborhood, Digital Ad Walkers
Imagine you are sitting in your garden, when suddenly, above your hedge, people walk by, presenting you with a relevant ad, perhaps something like, "You need to trim your hedge; buy these garden scissors now."
Turns out this is actually real. After seeing this, I can’t stop thinking about developing an advertising dashboard where you can set up ads, shown by these Ad Walkers, based on an AI model that has data on the houses and streets they pass. Every block or every house the ad changes 😂
Details:
https://www.buymediaspace.com/outdoor-advertising/category/look-walker
🤖How capable are LLMs really?
Sometimes when I use ChatGPT or other LLMs, I often assume the answers are correct. However, I have got mistakes in the answers to my questions quite a few times, making me more cautious nowadays, resulting in double-checking the responses, sometimes use multiple LLM’s and improving my prompts.
A study has been done and it turns out most LLM’s have a correct response rate of under 50%.
That’s not a lot! Be careful do not copy paste answers! I guess this will improve rapidly, GPT 5.0 is coming up in autumn, promising a lot of improvements.
Overall, the LLMs had an average correct response rate of well below 50%, with larger models generally performing significantly better than smaller ones (for instance, GPT-4o showing a correct response rate slightly above 60%), which again underpins the advantages of larger scales—yet also the largest scale models do not perform well enough for a model with robust basic reasoning
“It’s not like that this model (GPT 5.0) is going to get a little bit better, it’s because we’re going to make them all smarter, it’s going to be better across the board.”
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-ai-reveals-breakdown-large-language.html
https://readwrite.com/chatgpt-5-release-date-price-and-what-we-know-so-far/
👨💼KPI: These KPIs lead to company KPIs being met
Often in business, it’s all about KPIs, while understandable, often it is forgotten what leads to good results. How KPIs can be met without frustration. That’s why I share this picture:
🪧🔍Cheatsheet: comparison page for SEO & Paid Search
Often people either optimize pages for SEO or for Ads, but in fact it should go hand in hand. This cheat sheet I found combines them. I share it because I think it is important to have a more holistic view at pages. This cheatsheet is made for a SAAS tool but of course it can also be used for other purposes or goals.
⭐Lenny’s podcast: performance marketing
One of the best podcasts on product management and marketing is
’s podcast, I have already shared some of his work at this substack. His most recent podcast is worth sharing again. This podcast is on performance marketing. While it is often a bit basic, I wrote down these takeaways.Be sure to listen to it if you do not have a lot of experience in performance marketing, if you do have experience, it is still an interesting listen as there are always some things to learn.
My takeaways:
A sign of life test: "A sign of life test is really just a small, low-budget test to see if there's any interest or engagement on a particular platform. You're looking for any indication that your target audience is present and responsive. It's a way to validate that the platform is worth further investment before committing more resources."
A sign of life test, you do with your owned data. Build look-a-like audiences, you can do a 1% up to a 10% match. Build ad sets, 1 at 1%, 1 at 2-4%, and one at 5-7% and 8%+.
The podcast discusses how Coca-Cola utilized geo-targeting to reach specific executives. They identified key decision-makers within the company and tailored their campaign to address the executives' interests and needs. This included creating personalized messages and using precise geo-targeting techniques to ensure the content was seen by the intended audience. By focusing on the locations and behaviors of these executives, Coca-Cola’s campaign successfully captured their attention, demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted marketing in engaging influential corporate figures. They do not only reach the decision maker but also everyone around the decision-makers. Great case for B2B performance marketing.
On Agency’s: a lot of times, agencies have playbooks. Copy-paste formats that they know work well for other clients. This can be a double-edged sword because while it leverages past successes, it may not be customized enough for the specific needs or unique aspects of a (new) client's business. They do not dig deep enough.
Performance marketing is not showing as often as possible -that’s impression share- and that’s ego marketing, it’s about showing to the right person as often as possible. This can be measured with click share.
There is a nice story on localization, IBM was in doing paid advertisements in the whole continent of Africa. The biggest issue was not because the product was not good, but because they did not localize they could not convert.
You do not build awareness through search!
Video ads work super well currently, starting with emotion.
They show some cool reports as well. Worth a watch.
🇺🇸 Review of the year!
🇺🇸 Amazon AI will generate AI bullet points restricting special characters
✅➡️👩🚀AI listings help sellers selling in non-native languages
❌💰💪 No more special characters and emoticons possible
🫗🫐🥵Be careful AI generated bullets often not good enough, do not rely on them.
🇹🇭 Apple’s short film criticism
Apple creates short films as part of its "Shot on iPhone" campaign. The most recent video got some criticism from Netizens, especially in Thailand. They claim it shows a Thailand that’s long gone, that it presents Thailand as a low-tech and underdeveloped country. Readers of this substack, know that that is not true as I regularly write on Thailand’s e-commerce and retail sector. I think it can only benefit Thailand, these videos can attract tourism to Thailand, and from there they both see the new, tech-oriented Thailand as well as many traditional or older experiences.
Details:
🔍Google Search Console new filter: merchant listings
As a website and especially a webshop owner, it is sometimes important to dig into technical SEO. Brody Clark is a person who specializes in exactly that. Now he wrote an extensive article on a new filter in Google Search console. Google introduced a new filter in Google Search Console that allows you to track free product listing performance. He explains how it all works and how you can benefit including a use case.
Product snippets: this filter represents standard organic web page listings. The product snippet filter is an extension of the URL, title and description that appear for organic results, including elements such as a rating, review count, price or stock availability. Product snippets appear only within the 10-blue-link results.
Merchant listings: this filter goes beyond standard organic web page listings, involving representation of URLs from your website within features such as a popular products grid, product knowledge panels, along with areas such as Google Images and Google Lens.
Because AggregateOffer is showing in the structured data, this means that the site wouldn’t qualify for merchant listings. The impact of this can be quite widespread depending on the market a site is operating in, with the inability to rank within both Popular Product units and Product Knowledge Panels.
Details:
https://brodieclark.com/merchant-listings/
That’s it for this 50th edition. I hope you enjoyed reading. Edition 51 is coming up.
Greetings,